he drill-book and the camp of exercise,
proclaiming and insisting upon what she would have done if she could
only have chosen for him. Anna Chichele saw things that way. With more
than a passable sense of all that was involved, if she could have made
her son an artist in life or a commander-in-chief, if she could have
given him the seeing eye or Order of the Star of India, she would not
have hesitated for an instant. Judy, with her single mind, cried out,
almost at sight of him, upon them both, I mean both Anna and Sir Peter.
Not that the boy carried his condemnation badly, or even obviously; I
venture that no one noticed it in the mess; but it was naturally plain
to those of us who were under the same. He had put in his two years with
a British regiment at Meerut--they nurse subalterns that way for the
Indian army--and his eyes no longer played with the tinsel vision
of India; they looked instead into the arid stretch beyond. This
preoccupation conveyed to the Surgeon-Major's wife the suggestion that
Mr. Chichele was the victim of a hopeless attachment. Mrs. Harbottle
made no such mistake; she saw simply, I imagine, the beginnings of
her own hunger and thirst in him, looking back as she told us across a
decade of dusty sunsets to remember them. The decade was there, close to
the memory of all of us; we put, from Judy herself downward, an absurd
amount of confidence in it.

She looked so well the night she met him. It was English mail day;
she depended a great deal upon her letters, and I suppose somebody had
written her a word that brought her that happy, still excitement that
is the inner mystery of words. He went straight to her with some speech
about his mother having given him leave, and for twenty minutes she
patronized him on a sofa as his mother would not have dreamed of doing.

Anna Chichele, from the other side of the room, smiled on the pair.

'I depend on you and Judy to be good to him while we are away,' she
said. She and Sir Peter were going on leave at the end of the week to
Scotland, as usual, for the shooting.

Following her glance I felt incapable of the proportion she assigned me.
'I will see after his socks with pleasure,' I said. 'I think, don't you,
we may leave the rest to Judy?'

Her eyes remained upon the boy, and I saw the passion rise in them,
at which I turned mine elsewhere. Who can look unperturbed upon such a
privacy of nature as that?

'Poor old Judy!' she went on. 'She never would